Book reviews! For your reviewing-reviews pleasure!

#Understanding Italian Opera by Tim Carter, 2015

This came out in October 2015, so it’s the newest entry to the “Opera 4 Dummies” type of book, which is usually all you get in the local bookstore for opera history reading. This is a slightly more academic (and slightly more expensive) option than others, sort of a cross-over academic/popular level book. It would be a good text for a lower-level undergrad class. Now what sets this book apart from other older options is two key things:

One, this book represents a much more up-to-date approach to the modern global Italian opera scene, which has greatly expanded from the previous dark ages (like ...the 90s) when Italian opera was considered to have properly started with Mozart and neatly ended with Puccini; to now include two whole pre-Classical operas out of five total. 40% of the operas in a popular-level book is an unprecedented level of coverage, and speaks to early and baroque opera’s amazing recovery from obscurity. (To be specific the book covers one opera each for Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini.)

Two, the book is almost entirely focused on poetry, and only discusses music to show how it fits and reflects the poetry, which is pretty wild, and I have not seen that outside of deep dark academic books on opera. It’s a solid approach, and one which pays respect to the understanding of Italian opera as it was consumed in its “natural” lifetime.

The poetry content is extremely solid, rhyme structures are well explained, poetry is provided in original and English translation, and I totally got schooled on Italian poetry. It also, on a simpler level, just reminds people librettists EXISTED, and why we should give an opera with the names of its librettist+composer and not just the composer, even though we customarily do not.

The social and musical history content was certainly acceptable but not incredible, in particular I thought the castrati history was kinda bad (mostly because he INSULTED MORESCHI, ring the shame bell), however, considering past castrati coverage in intro-level opera books, wherein the author usually decides it’s best to keep opera respectable for the new converts by not mentioning this bit of awkwardness (easy enough if you skip baroque opera entirely), really it’s much better than it has been. At this point we’re just happy to be invited to the party at all.

I wouldn’t recommend this as a beginning opera history book though, since it’s quite dry and doesn’t conveny a scrap of the “fun factor” around modern opera and opera history - and opera is very fun! People had and continue to have fun at the opera. But as a 3rd or 4th opera history book for an advanced-casual opera reader, quite solid reading.

My copy of this book was free from publisher for the purposes of review.

#This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake and Its Aftermath by Mark Molesky, 2015

I’ve had a casual research interest in the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 since I first read that Caffarelli somehow lived through it. While I haven’t found much information about his personal story, I’ve still been working on some background reading on the event. This new book on the topic came out in November 2015 (around the 260th anniversary of the event I later noticed), and as I was first in line for my public library system’s 1 copy, after the library processed it, I got to promptly read it...as my first book of 2016. Womp womp. I’m cheap though.

But it was well worth the wait! This is good, solid, popular-level history, written in an engaging and page-turning style, I read all 300ish pages in two days. It’s a bit emotionally heavy, but I feel the author’s emotional investment in the history is sincere, and he wasn’t writing emotionally just to peddle schmaltz, so I was accepting of my heart-strings being constantly tugged with first-person narratives of death and injury. The author also makes a good argument for why this particular natural disaster was both a transformative event to religion and philosophy in Europe, and yet, why it has also been almost completely forgotten outside of Portugal.

Recommended especially if you’re into environmental history.

#Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David E. Coke and Alan Borg, 2011

I got this book because it was recommended on a historical romance novel blog. That’s I guess how I pick out academic books these days.

Vauxhall Gardens was 18th century London’s Disneyworld, and therefore it does appear in many books of Ladies Special Interest Reading. It had wide promenades, music, food, art, and later on, Novelty Acts like tightrope walking, balloon flights, and fireworks. It also cost a mere shilling to get in for most of its life, making it accessible to a fair amount of London. It was the sort of place you could both take your kids for some wholesome family entertainment, and also the sort of place you could go to pick up some mollies and have sex in the bushes. The author makes this seeming impossibility coherent, and has also collected the largest set of images of the art and documentary maps on Vauxhall yet published. (Though to be fair, no one has published a book at all on Vauxhall since the 50s.) Did you know there are only 2 known photographs of Vauxhall, taken right before it was torn down in 1859? It is extremely strange to see a picture of Vauxhall if you already know it from it’s main legacy: a perpetual, peripheral ghost of 18th-19th century social life.

Vauxhall also was one of the few places in the 18th century presenting solid English music, as it were: the composers were overwhelmingly native (except Handel, who is honorarily English anyway), the musicians were English, and the singers were English. If you want to understand English resistance to Italian and French culture, as well nativization of other European music styles, you have to look at Vauxhall.

Is it acceptable to knock a book down for being just WAY TOO LARGE? This book is too large. I found it physically punishing to read. I read it with a pillow in my lap. I know it’s an Art Book (™), but I mean really. It’s still majority text. According to Amazon it weighs six pounds. It does not come in e-book. I slightly suspect no one was expected to actually READ this book, just buy it, look at a few of the pictures, and put it on a shelf, so probably I am the one in the wrong here. But this book is widely appealing and well-researched, so I do recommend it, if you have strong forearms.

It feels a little too satisfying to have a flawed book to share with you this week. I've taken the plunge into Richard Basset's For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1619-1918 and boy oh boy is it an experience. I've found myself using the Kindle's note-taking feature for the first time ever, so numerous have been the occasions on which I have wanted to brandish the page at someone and demand to know what this guy thinks he's on about.

Basset is a clear and unashamed Austrian and Habsburg fanboy. So am I in a sense, or I wouldn't be interested in studying the history, but Basset practically pitches a tent at the chance to defend the nation and family. This would be acceptable... if he actually argued his case or sourced his claims. The book is packed full of questionable assertions, unsupported figures and personal details he appears to have manufactured out of whole cloth. He "describes" the emotions and feelings of men over four hundred years removed from us, such as the Austrian cavalry vedette conducting a reconnaissance east of Györ in 1683 who spotted the invading Ottoman army that would lay siege to Vienna, in a series of paragraphs mostly sourced from Rilke's poetry. He asserts that said Ottoman army had but one goal, to exterminate Christianity. Wheatcroft's Enemy at the Gates, which one would have thought would be useful reading for someone writing about the Austrian army, pretty comprehensively explains the motivations of Mehmed IV and Kara Mustafa for launching the invasion, but Basset gives the Ottomans all the characterisation of a horde of Orcs.

The chapter on the Austrian Habsburg involvement in the 30 Years' War, with a substantial amount of time spent on Wallenstein, is academic fellatio. Oddly, Basset references Wilson's Europe's Tragedy, and yet appears to have taken little to nothing from that comprehensive work, uncritically spinning his implausibly-detailed account of the general's assassination from Francis Watson's Soldier Under Saturn (1938!), a work that was, tellingly, used in a book about hero worship by Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Elsewhere, the first half of the war with its early Imperial successes, the death of Gustavus Adolphus and the battle of Nordlingen hog the spotlight; Imperial reverses (such as Breitenfeld and the utter disintegration of Gallas' army as it retreated from Denmark) receive a cursory note or go unmentioned.

For God and Kaiser reads like a pop history- fawning and uncritical, it seems to not contemplate being questioned. This is an odd expectation for something addressing the army of the Habsburgs, something that, with the exception of its First World War incarnation, is definitely not going to find much of an audience outside of the specialist market. Other works go into more detail on the individual eras Basset covers: simply on the periods looked at in the first two chapters, Wilson and Wheatcroft's aforementioned texts will give you far more information on the Habsburg military forces, commanders and operations of the 30 Years' War and the Siege of Vienna respectively. I am finding myself frustrated and intrigued by the book's qualities and will persevere, but on the strength of what I have read so far I can not in good conscience recommend it to anyone.

Outside of my specialty, I continue to read Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia 1772-1832, which is genuinely transforming my understanding of Virginia in the Early Republic and the nature of Jeffersonian ideology. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of slavery, the history of the South, the history of the Early Republic, or American history in general.

I am also reading Butterfield's original essay "The Whig Interpretation of History", which is equally amazing. It isn't so much telling me something I don't know, but restating it more systematically and eloquently than I ever could.

Within my specialty, I am perusing Oakshott's Records of the Medieval Sword which is a much more scholarly, careful and mature book than The Archaeology of Weapons.

Based on a review from a post here a little over a month ago, I went and bought Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin, which I finished the other day.

First off, it was a great read, and I'm a little disappointed I have to wait until later this year for the second volume, and until 2019 for the final book in the trilogy. It will be well worth the wait, and if the next two are anywhere close in size to this edition, it will be some 3,000 pages of great reading.

However that number is a little high to just focus on Stalin. And indeed, Kotkin did not exclusively look at him. He actually didn't expressly write a biography, as little to nothing about Stalin's personal life is included here, and some time periods are largely glossed over. While he does note that it was more a political look at Stalin in the introduction, that is a little disappointing.

That said, there is a considerable amount of extra details included about the time period, so much that it really shouldn't be referred to as a biography of Stalin. Kotkin goes into great detail of the last years of the Russian Empire (mainly the political situation, 1904-1917) as well as the intrigues that the 1917 Revolutions brought on. The early years of the Bolsheviks are also examined in great detail, as is the Russian effort in the First World War.

Finally there is the citations and bibliography. This totals roughly 200 pages combined, all in microscopic print, and is great. Kotkin's citations are excellent, and provide so much valuable information that couldn't easily fit into the text itself, and his bibliography covers such a wide variety of topics it has aided me in my current efforts to write my thesis. I also found out that there is/was a historian with my surname out there who wrote a few things on the early Bolsheviks, which came as a surprised, as I didn't know there were any historians with my (relatively uncommon) surname, let alone in a somewhat similar field as me (granted his work dates to the 1970s, so I'm not sure if he's still alive or not). I highly recommend anyone interested in anything related to the topic to read the book.

I've been reading The Death Penalty in China: Policy, Practice, and Reform a book of essays about, as the title says, the death penalty in China, focussing on changes and development in policy and public opinion since the 1950s, largely, up to the modern day, looking at Mao, changes in the judicial system, the Deng era and the abolition movements and progress of the 21st century. I don't know much modern Chinese history apart from having an interest due to family members living in China, but I've been very interested in the modern abolition movement and have followed its developments as closely as I could, and this book provides an interesting and accessible (the timelines really helped me sort out all the events) overview as well as looking at the historical context of capital punishment and the journey to abolition (that China appears to be taking).

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to gain access to academic reference works without being a member of the academy? I realize there's no such thing as a free lunch, but I would kill for access to the Encyclopedia of Islam. Brill charges $70 a month, Amazon is $450 for hardcover or $100 for CD (and I don't live in a country that gets Amazon anyways!)

I still get JSTOR through my alumni account, but the Encyclopedia of Islam isn't a JSTOR reference.

We get questions on here more or less constantly that I either have to go by memory, refer to something imperfect, or hope that I can find a reference in JSTOR or google books whereas I know that there would be a good entry in the Encylcopedia of Islam (or, for that matter, various other reference works I would add to the wishlist like the Encyclopedia Iranica, the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, etc.)

edit: just to clarify, I live in the UAE, so local university/library access is going to be minimal/non-existent. Best I could probably do on that front is see if NYU Abu Dhabi would take pity on me, but I highly doubt it.

Is there some type of resource that I can use to look for well regarded history books?

Say, for example, I'm looking for a good, broad history of the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Conquest of Latin America. How do I know where to look? I suppose I could ask here on Saturdays but that doesn't seem efficient. I'd like to be able to find an arbiter of good history.

Thanks!

Just started reading The Persians: Ancient Medieval, and Modern Iran by Homa Katouzian. Seems like a good book so far, though I'm curious what people who are more knowledgeble in Iranian history think of it After this I plan on reading Iran: empire of the mind by Micheal Axworthy. Any other books I should look into? I've already read Ervand Abrahamian's A History of Modern Iran.

Just about done with The Slaveholding Republic. I like it well enough, but I've hit the chapters at the end where the original author didn't finish and a much lesser wordsmith took over. The content isn't awful, but I'm a bit annoyed that as soon as Lincoln got elected it turned into a book all about Abe. I'm fond of the guy too, but what was a broad survey of the United States government's involvement with slavery has collapsed into a Lincoln biography.

Other than that, and trying just a little too hard to excuse the Founders for their own slavery dealings, it's a pretty solid book.

Any books on European Medieval history? I'm interested in literally everything about it. Dynasties, political theory, politics, military history, intrigue, etc.

This week I finished reading Hans von Luck's Panzer Commander: The Memoirs of Colonel Hans von Luck. I really liked it and its description of the different theatres he participated in. It gave me some idea of what it was like for a German soldier but still had a wide enough perspective to be able to give a good description of the main events going on. With that said I was wondering if his credibility has been challenged? Are there any examples of claims which have been shown to be false? The closest I could find of the top of my head was when he said something along the lines of he wasn't sure why Malta hadn't been attacked which I know isn't true. But if anyone had any other information I'd greatly appreciate it.